The ability to “Bring Your Own Device” (BYOD) is a desired feature for more and more video conferencing systems. With BYOD, meeting participants are able to use their own devices such as laptops, tablets, and cell phones to send/receive video and audio while participating in the conference. If a participant has his own device, the microphone on the device may be used to pick up good audio signal as the microphone is closer to the talking participant. The acronym BYOD will be used to refer to the actual device that a meeting participant may bring to a conference session.
Acoustic echo cancellation (AEC) has several challenges when audio from microphones on BYODs is involved. The number of BYODs may change dynamically during a meeting/conference session, and consequently the computation power requirement of AEC changes. The processer of the audio system used for the conference session may not have enough computation power to support AEC for both array microphones used in audio system (and positioned in a conference room) and BYOD microphones. The audio system receives audio signals from BYOD microphones through a digital network. The signal from each BYOD has a different delay, depending on network conditions. Additionally, each BYOD has its own microphone signal sampling clock that may be different from the sampling clock of loudspeaker of the conference audio system. Speaker signals and BYOD microphone signals need to be aligned accurately and the clock differences have to be compensated for AEC to perform well.